Making Pretty (26 page)

We don't get to tell my family.

When I get home, Karissa has made a feast of fried baked goods and my father, Arizona, and Roxanne are at the counter with coffees and grimaces.

Bernardo is miserable against the stove. He doesn't have coffee but looks like he needs it.

“She came into the room,” he says.

“Bernardo slept over,” I say. We were going to tell them that anyway, so it doesn't matter, and I don't know what the tortured look on his face means.

“I saw the note you left for him,” Karissa says. “So I told them everything.”

She does not mean she told them
everything
. She means she told them everything about me.

“I was at Natasha's,” I say, even though it is now a thing everyone knows.

“I told them that. And I told them about you and Bernardo,” Karissa says. “We're family. We shouldn't have secrets.”

Her words pummel me. She doesn't even blink with shame over how insane that statement is coming from her mouth. Instead her voice is cool and strong. She should be hungover, like us, but she's not. Or else her coffee is magical.

“This isn't true, right?” Arizona says.

“I'm hungover,” I say. “Sorry, Dad. Can I eat like seven of those things? And I'm sorry about the sleepover. I know. I get it. I'm rebelling or whatever, I guess.”

“I mean, Natasha? Natasha's the fucking worst,” Arizona says.

“I should go home,” Roxanne says. She can't stop fidgeting on the stool.

“Stay. I thought you should be here to hear about Montana's engagement,” Karissa says. It's hard to decipher exactly what the look on her face is. She seems proud of herself, kind of sarcastic. Then I realize what it is: smug. She's smug.

“Montana is not engaged,” Dad says. Arizona nods. She is red-eyed, and her face has that post-crying droop to it. Like it's worn itself out with too much emotion.

I keep eye contact with Bernardo and hope that he somehow saves me from having to do this here and now and in this way. The things that were beautiful about our love are breaking, and it hurts. I want to take the perfect parts that are still left and bury them in the backyard so no one else can get them.

“Let me see your hand,” Dad says.

“No,” I say. I'm remembering we live in New York and don't have a backyard. I have nowhere to bury all the good things. They're going to be taken from me.

“Who
are
you?” Arizona says. She looks like she might punch me. Her shoulders are back and her hands are up.

“Who is
Karissa
?” I say. “Did she tell you about herself? About her lies?”

“Come on now, Montana,” Dad says, and of course I'm the one who sounds crazy. Karissa threw me under the bus first, so that anything I say is now suspect. Desperate.

Karissa serves me a whole bunch of French toast pastries. They are too eggy, and she puts too much syrup on them, and she's wearing one of my father's crisp white work shirts, and I hate her more than I've ever hated any of them because she lied the most. She glares at me.

“Everything Karissa's told you about herself is a total lie,” I say.

“We're talking about you right now, Montana,” Dad says. He's stern and fatherly. He thinks I am insane. Especially in last night's clothes with last night's smells and today's headache.

“Okay, well, we don't need to talk about me. I can do what I want,” I say. I sound about ten. It's awful. And Bernardo looks mad too, like I'm supposed to jump up and down and stand up for our love in the face of all this judgment and all these pastries. “It's not even the issue. The issue is Karissa. She's why we're leaving!”

“She's not why we're leaving,” Bernardo says in his small, hurt voice.

“Leaving?” Arizona says, and Roxanne shakes her head at me like
it is definitely time for me to shut the eff up.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask Karissa. I try to think of ways to tell them about her lies where I don't sound like I'm trying to get some messed-up kind of revenge.

“We're together, Montana,” Karissa says. “Your father and I. I can't keep secrets from him like that. I'm not like you and Natasha and all these other women, keeping secrets, being half in the relationship and half out. He's going to be my family. That means something real to me. I value him. And our family.”

Arizona winces at the name Natasha and turns away from me, so far in the other direction that she's facing the wall. I wonder if I've lost her.

“But you haven't been honest! Oh my God, this is insane! She made up everything about her family. I am not the liar here. I'm not the big ugly secret keeper!”

“Show me your hand,” Dad says again. His voice is louder.

“Show him,” Karissa says, like I'm going to listen to her instead of him. She puts her hand in his and tilts her head and assumes this motherly stance that is absolute bullshit.

“She lets us drink,” I say. “It's probably illegal.” Now I'm desperate. If the Big Things won't resonate, maybe I can make them believe the smaller things. The little hiccups that have been adding up all summer so far.

“Montana, I'm not fucking around right now,” Dad says. His face is severe. He's loud and spitting. I show him my hand. The one with the tattoo. It's funny that he finds it so surprising, given that he clearly
knew it was there. “You didn't do this,” he says.

“We're in love,” I say.

But then I'm crying too. Because this isn't really how it's supposed to be. This is more like Dad telling me and Arizona about his latest wife in the diner and not at all like the celebration and romance Bernardo and I wanted. This isn't special and ours. This, too, is like the painting of the person with the painting of the person with the painting. A repeat of a repeat of a repeat.

“Did you think I would like this?” Dad says. His voice drops, and he's talking only to me now. Arizona stomps out of the room, and Roxanne follows her with a sigh of relief. I look to Bernardo, but he's staying still. Steady. He's not leaving me with this. He pours himself a coffee and keeps an eye on Karissa, like she might jump one or both of us. Like she's an explosive.

“It has nothing to do with you,” I say. “You need to worry about who you're marrying. She's not who she says—”

“I thought you didn't believe in marriage,” Dad says. It does sound like something I would have said in the diner or on the stoop or right here, over coffee, wishing I could smoke in front of my father.

“I don't believe in
your
marriages,” I say.

“You're a kid. You don't know what you need or want. Or what you believe in.”

I have lost the ability to speak.

“You're going to change,” Dad says. “A million times over.” It sounds more like a hope of his than a fact. And it stings, since I've seen a photograph detailing all the ways he'd like me to change.

“Montana doesn't want to change for you,” Bernardo says.

“Well, what the hell do you think she's doing with you?” Karissa says.

Bernardo pretends not to have heard her. But I heard her.

“This is all me,” I say. I mean the hair and the eyebrow ring and the tattoo and the being in love with Bernardo. But I also mean it in comparison to Karissa, and even Arizona, who are both part plastic and faking it. “You've always wanted me to change,” I say to my father, the most honest I've ever been to him, the most direct. “You gave me that stupid gift certificate and told me I'd never be good enough and you sit there waiting for me to improve, and sorry, but this is who I'm going to be.”

“Gift certificate?” Dad asks.

I wonder if there has been a single day I haven't thought about the plastic surgery gift certificate promise in my drawer. It's like my mother—a thing that is haunting me and changing everything. A thing I wish weren't true.

“You and Natasha. Our thirteenth birthdays. The promise of plastic surgery,” I say, thinking we're family and I can use shorthand, but Dad looks full-on befuddled.

“That was a long time ago,” Dad says. “A lifetime ago. I don't remember everything single thing that happened when—”

I wish Arizona were hearing this with me.

“You don't remember,” I say. I knew. But I didn't really know.

“I'm sure there's all kinds of things we both remember differently,” he says.

“It's in my bedroom. It's a thing you did to me. It's
the
thing you did to me,” I say. “It wasn't a lifetime ago. None of it was. It's all part of my lifetime. All of it.” I look him right in the eye. I say it clearly, the way we rarely talk to each other.

Dad doesn't look down or up or anywhere else.

He furrows his brow and tries to remember. Seeing him try to remember is almost as good as him remembering. I think he's about to apologize. Or tell me he remembers. Or tell me that he believes me, that it happened and that it mattered and that it changed everything.

“We'll work through this,” Karissa says, “as a family. We can go to family counseling. We'll talk about it. Okay? We can consider it. Bernardo is a really nice guy. So now we're all on the same page, and I think we can all agree that Montana shouldn't be seeing this Natasha woman, and then everything will be fine and she can make a nice, clearheaded choice with her family.”

Karissa's voice sounds so different. Unnatural. Like a cartoon version of a mother. Swinging and singing and old.

Bullshit.

Even my dad feels it. He clears his throat.

Maybe he even pauses to hear the things I've been saying in this kitchen, about her lies. About not knowing who she actually is.

Maybe he sees how much he's chosen not to see over the years.

He shuffles his feet and looks from me to Bernardo to Karissa and back around again. He pours himself a coffee and lets Bernardo pass him the milk. We all listen to the endless racket of the city outside the window. The noises we don't usually even notice because we're
so used to them, but sometimes, at the most important times, we hear them like strangers would. Like tourists in a strange land, we finally see where we live and who we are.

It's the eye of a storm, but I don't know what's on the other side of it. I'm no meteorologist.

“That's not actually right, Karissa,” he says. He clears his throat again, and I wonder if he'll be able to get the words out at all. I'm stunned into silence. “This is between me and my daughter.” It's a squeaky sound. And sad.

“Our daughter,” Karissa says. I don't even recognize her. I squint, to see if that will help, but she's not a girl I know anymore. She's grasping.

She was never the girl I thought I knew. She is only an invented person. It's terrifying me still, the casual way she lied about something so large. And now she's lying here too. Calling me her daughter. Changing her face. Pretending to be someone else.

I wonder what we'll look like in her retelling of this part of her life. Because I know now, with a fierce certainty, that she will retell this to someone in five years or ten and it will be entirely changed. Resculpted for her purposes. More dramatic or tragic or beautiful than it really is.

She has a lot in common with my father, in some ways. They both reimagine reality to be something different. My father creating people anew just as Karissa creates her life anew.

“No,” Dad says, his voice growing louder. It feels like a door has opened between us. “She's not your daughter at all. In any way. She's
mine.” He's talking to Karissa the way he's talked to me and Arizona in the past. Deliberate and sure. Inarguable.

Karissa slams down her coffee mug and storms upstairs.

“You should go too,” Dad says to Bernardo. For sure Bernardo's adjusting his body into the shape of an anchor so that he can stay, but Dad taking a sudden stand makes me want to follow suit. I have to do the same.

“I'll meet you later,” I say.

“I don't want to leave you with this,” he says, and rubs his tattoo like it's a genie's bottle that will grant him the wish of staying with me, but I don't want anything but to stand in the moment where my father declared me to be his family over Karissa.

“I'm okay,” I say. “I promise.” He leans in to kiss me, but I'm so afraid of wrecking what's happened that I only let him kiss my cheek. This moment is made of glass. It is not a durable thing.

And like that, it's me and my dad drinking coffee in the kitchen. Like fathers and daughters do.

There are two bridesmaid dresses laid out on my bed three days later—one for me and one for Arizona. There's a note from Karissa about being sorry but also proud and on a quest to do the right thing.

It tells me not to drive a wedge between her and my father.

It tells me to be careful.

It tells me she hopes I like the dress.

I promised my father we'd come to the wedding when I sat with him in the kitchen the other day.

“Karissa's family didn't die in a car crash,” I said, and watched his face for signs of horror.

He nodded. “If that's true, it's quite shocking,” he said.

“Like, scary, Dad,” I said. I wanted more of an impact. I wanted to see myself reflected in him—the crazed feelings I had in the club coming to the surface on his face, in his words. “You can't be with someone like that.”

“I said this was different,” he said. “I love her. I love all of her, no matter what. I'm working on it. That's what you girls want, right? For me to love someone without wanting to change them?” He looked heartbroken—the down-turned mouth of someone who keeps failing even when they think they're succeeding.

“Not, like, unconditionally,” I said. Dad sighed and rubbed his forehead. He ate some French toast pastries and poured another cup of coffee for himself, so full that it splashed out the top and singed his fingers and spotted his shirt. Normally he'd run upstairs and fix it, but he didn't this time. He stayed with me.

“I'm trying to do the unconditional loving thing,” Dad said. “It's not going to be perfect. But I'm marrying this girl.”

“You've already changed her,” I said. I wanted to tell him that every time he changed her I took it as a sign that he wants me to change too. I wanted to tell him I'd seen the terrible picture in his desk and that I may never recover from that, either. I wanted to tell him how unnecessary and depressing it all is—these problems he'd created.

But he looked so sad and small, pouring syrup on the pastries and avoiding eye contact, that I couldn't.

“You know what your mom used to say?” he said at last. He picked up my hand, the one with the ring tattoo, and turned it over, looking at the mark.

“I have no idea, actually,” I said. I gave him a strong look, like he needed a reminder that I don't really have a mom, not the way I'm supposed to.

“I'm not going to get it quite right,” he said. “She had a way with words, your mother.”

“I didn't know that either,” I said. I sounded bitter without meaning to, but maybe that's simply what I was, about my mother. Bitter.

“She used to say something about love meaning that you can see something awful in someone and not want to change it. That's why she left me, she said. Because I didn't get that.”

He twirled a piece of pastry around and around in the syrup, making sticky patterns.

“I probably didn't say it right,” he said.

I wanted to hear her say it right. I wanted that bad.

And I wanted to be like my mother. This little bit. This one little bit.

Arizona's in her old room, lying on the bed and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars she put on the ceiling a million years ago, when Mom sent some letter about how you can see so many stars when you're out of the city. Arizona wanted the city to be every bit as good as wherever Mom was. To prove her wrong.

“We have the dresses,” I say. I hold them up so she can get a look at the bright-red color, the ribbon straps, the too-low necklines.

“We're not wearing them,” Arizona says.

“On board. What are we gonna do? Jeans with bikinis? Our Halloween costumes from the year we were mice?”

“He doesn't want to marry her,” Arizona says. “That's what you said, right? When he talked to her the other day, he told her she wasn't family?”

“Like, sort of,” I say. I get out cigarettes and light one for each of us.

“You know I don't smoke,” she says.

“This is a smoking conversation.”

She takes it from me and inhales. It's weird to love something so stupid as smoking under fake stars with your sister, but I think I love it more than anything else I've done this summer.

“Maybe he won't go through with it,” I say.

“That never happens,” Arizona says. She's so much sadder than I realized. On her back her boobs stay pointed straight up to the sky, but the rest of her is drooping.

“Things change,” I say, not totally sure if I believe it.

I tell her the things he said about our mother. She gets what I imagine is the same look on her face that I had—longing and hopefulness that there's a solution to all this. An explanation. A key.

“I want to look in the Closet of Forgotten Things,” Arizona says.

“I've taken a lot from it recently,” I say. I don't want her to go scrounging in there looking for the sweatband I took when I went to see Tess, or the cardigan I wore out with Karissa that first night at Dirty Versailles. Not that Arizona would ever notice any of these things, but I've made so many mistakes lately I don't want to risk it.

“I'm sorry,” I say. It's maybe the first time I've ever said it out loud and without a caveat. An impossible thing that is probably true. I hold back the explanation about love and spontaneity and the need to be different from everyone else and let the words sit there, untouched.

Arizona nods.

“You shouldn't have had a whole thing with Natasha without me,” she says. She holds out her fingers for another cig. We're in it. We're going for it. There's a desperate need for a cracked window, but we
haven't done it yet. Almost as if we like being caught in a cloud of smoke and cancer and after-smell.

“You hated her,” I say.

“Well, exactly.”

“I didn't,” I say.

“But you did. And if you didn't, you should have.”

I let a huge sigh escape. “Do you hate them on behalf of Mom?” I say. “Because isn't she pretty hateable too?” It seems impossible, but this is now the most we've ever really talked about Mom. Not our feelings about her, at least. Not acknowledging that we want something from her. We've wondered where in the world she is and we've left postcards from her out on each other's dressers so that we can both see them, so that there are no secrets between us.

I've been awful, when I really think it through.

“I wish Dad had remembered exactly what Mom said. About being in love,” Arizona says. “We should know things like that, don't you think?” The words are coming out slowly, and I think she's spent all summer avoiding this room and these fake stars while I've spent it falling in love. Historically speaking, we didn't used to do things separately. We lived different variations of the same life until right now. “Mom was so sad, before she left. When she started getting surgeries.”

“To the closet!” I say. I'm not sure I'm ready for Arizona's revelations, and the air in her room is feeling very close and too humid. The girl needs an air conditioner in a desperate way.

“I've been sad,” Arizona says. “Or maybe angry. I've been really angry. Going away makes everything seem bigger and smaller, both.
Clearer. All these strangers ask about your life and your family, and when you tell them . . . you see in their faces how fucked up it all is. I hated that about being in college.” I'd thought she loved everything about being away from me and the people who know her best. “And you've changed. And Roxanne has a whole new life. And how am I the oldest but the least together? And why is Dad okay with marrying someone who clearly hates me? And did she really lie about her whole life and family? Shouldn't we be scared of that and not getting dressed up to celebrate it? And why are you so eager to do the things Dad does?”

“I don't have any of those answers,” I say.

“Not even about you marrying Bernardo?”

I think I'm not so sure I'm marrying Bernardo.

I think that's not an answer I have anymore.

I think I have to tell Bernardo that I want a space between being so, so together and being apart. That I want that third thing. The slow love thing. The getting-to-know-someone thing. The loving-someone-no-matter-what thing, built over time.

But he might not want those things. He might get the Casey-look on his face.

“You know what was nice?” I say. Neither of us are addressing the other one's questions or comments. It's a funny way to have a conversation.

“Hm?”

“Being at the park. When he and I didn't speak. And he was the mysterious guy with the weird scarf and thick glasses and I was Montana and everything was undecided.”

We head to the Closet of Forgotten Things, and unload it item by item. We play a sad version of our game, where we're both pretty depressed about the whole situation. Turning a snow globe of Cleveland upside down, I tear up.

“Beginning of the relationship,” I say. “Cleveland could only be construed as romantic at the very beginning.”

“Seems like something he would have done for Tess,” Arizona says.

“No,” I say, surprised that I remember something that Arizona doesn't. “It was for Mom. She collected them. Snow globes. You don't remember? At the end, though, he got her an Eiffel Tower one and an ice-skating one and one with little kids sledding with their mom. In the beginning he must have gotten her snow globes on even the stupidest trips, in the airports. Like, how much do you have to love someone to get them a snow globe of Cleveland?”

“And how much do you have to love someone to keep it?” Arizona says.

“But she didn't keep it,” I say. “She forgot it.”

I shake up the snow globe again. Mini Cleveland gets stuck in a hurricane of confetti-like snow.

“We should bring it to her,” Arizona says. Fake snow is more mesmerizing than I would have thought, and I don't think I've heard her right.

“Hm?”

“Mom. We should bring her the things we think are hers.” Next
to Arizona there's a pile of other things that she must have been gathering when I was pretending to be in a Cleveland snowstorm. Some bangle-y bracelets. A Knicks hat. A pouch of crystals. “And we could find out what she said to Dad, about love and change and stuff. And I don't know, whatever else we need? We could do that.”

“Okay,” I say, because sometimes changing everything is really simple. “Let's go to California.”

Arizona smiles, but I'm not kidding. I have the suitcase and the money saved up and the snap of interest that Bernardo caused when he started talking about running away together the other night. Without another pause, Arizona is on board. I can see it in her eyes and her shoulders that move back and down from their slumped-forward, sad position. We're going. Like that.

And that's what love is, I think. The automatic yes. The unthinking agreement.

The way people can be in two places one minute and one place the next. Like teleporting is possible.

Love is teleporting.

I'm totally figuring this all out.